July 1

July 1 Rrin: Well, here we are, in the car once again. Sometimes I wonder if we drive so much every day just to create convenient opportunities for us to blog. We are a captive labor force. Actually, it’s not such a bad thing. Like Nicole said yesterday, sometimes we all need an excuse for a break from interacting with everyone else for just a few minutes. Right now we are on our way to Victoria Falls (Vic Falls, to the locals, or those who pretend to be…I’m learning the lingo, slowly but surely.) This morning we woke up to another impressive sunrise—our motivation to get up in the freezing cold desert mornings—and tried to warm up our numb fingers on mugs of tea from the campfire. Once we got on the road, though, and the sun was blazing down on us, we were closing all the windows to keep out the omnipresent dust, stripping off layers of clothing, and wishing the air conditioning hadn’t decided to quit on us yesterday. Our route of choice took us through the famous Makgadikgadi Pans, these big old salt pans left over from former lakes. With the help of several maps, two guidebooks, and our trusty GPS gadget, we made it through the pans without ever having to use the book’s detailed instructions for salvaging your vehicle after it sinks chassis-deep in the mud. Lonely Planet’s guide to Botswana also warns drivers not to succumb to the temptation to take off with reckless abandon toward the open horizons of the pans. Fortunately, Travis was able to resist those primal urges to drive as fast as he could into the great unknown, so we arrived safely at the other side. Getting stuck in the middle of nowhere would’ve made quite a story, but we’ll settle for convenience this time. Since then, we’ve checked out a few impressive baobab trees (which, according to Tswana lore, were uprooted by the gods and stuck back in the ground upside down), sighted a steinbok, several giraffes, and a zebra carcass, and had a picnic of tuna sandwiches while sitting on a baobab root. And drove. In fact, we just crossed the Botswana-Zimbabwe border on our way to our next campsite by Vic Falls. This immigration experience was decidedly less exciting than the one at the South Africa-Botswana border. No sprinting to closing windows this time. You could tell the people here were more efficient because the immigration employees were playing Free Cell on their computers as they worked instead of Solitaire. Seriously. So now we all have shiny new Zimbabwe visas on our passports, and, if all goes well, we may even head out to the falls to see the full moon make a moonbow in the mist tonight. But we’re not getting our hopes up. You never know what kind of unexpected adventures might arise in the next five kilometers. Erin